Moving Day? Expect Free Food, Free Drink — and No Secrets

Springtime in Paris brings the spirited Foire du Trone. Washington, D.C., blooms with spectacular cherry blossoms. Philadelphia hosts its renowned, international flower show.

Here in the greater State College metropolitan area, however, spring means something else:

Moving season.

Not that we don’t have our own pretty flowers and fairs here. But take a drive through Nittanyland these days, and tell me that the U-Haul van hasn’t become the temporary official vehicle of Happy Valley.

Yard and garage sales are the new tailgate parties. Dumpster divers and curbside scavengers descend like snow birds returning from the Gulf coast.

So, too, does that treasured — and inevitable — sign of the season: a desperate friend’s plea for household-moving help.

If you say yes?

‘That’s a big step in a relationship. The biggest,’ as Jerry Seinfeld put it in his sitcom. ‘That’s like going all the way.’

So it was that a ragtag crew assembled Sunday morning to move a great friend of mine. To protect the innocent, we’ll call him Isaac — not his actual name.

See, you may think you know someone really well. You may think you have him all figured out.

Then you stumble across some Men at Work and Rod Stewart records in his otherwise-enviable vinyl collection. And suddenly you have rhetorical — metaphorical — ammo for the next six months.

Really, that could be just as valuable as the near-bottomless beer, coffee and hoagies you’ve been promised for your grossly — embarrassingly — unskilled labor.

‘When your friends move you, you have no secrets,’ Isaac conceded — a preemptive raising of the white flag.

It was a good maneuver on his part, especially given another discovery: his Phillies baseball cards.

‘Burn ’em,’ ordered hoagie-eating laborer No. 3.

However tempted, we did not. We were better off without the conflagration, anyway.

Because Isaac’s newest neighbor, Mildred (not her actual name), delivers plenty of fire herself.

‘God-damned birds,’ she announced, glaring down at a natural mess outside Isaac’s new place. ‘All they do is (drop excrement) everywhere.’

Mildred’s in her 80s, but no less fresh — or frisky — for her years. She ‘keeps it alive,’ as Isaac told me.

‘You’re God-damned right I do,’ Mildred said.

She soon wanted to know where Isaac’s ‘other yayhoos’ had gotten to.

Not to worry, Mildred. The yayhoos were just scattered between Isaac’s new and old abodes.

The former place — before the yayhoos got to it, at least — was a shrine to the intellectual bachelor: two parts library and one part music, with respectable measures of baseball paraphernalia, beer and dust. (I don’t judge. You haven’t seen my house.)

See those half-dozen dusty baseballs on that end table? hoagie-eating laborer No. 3 asked.

Sure, I said.

Those are all the balls that Isaac hit during his four-year college baseball career, No. 3 said.

Snap.

Blissfully unaware or deliberately nonplussed, Isaac held forth.

We writerly types — we’re easy targets. We tend to tire easily — too easily — from hard physical labor. Give us a keyboard, and we’ll tell you a story. But give us a hammer or a hand truck, and something’s getting broken, probably in spectacular fashion.

‘The keyboard (work) is not an aerobic workout,’ No. 3 reminded me.

Too true, I acknowledged as much too much sweat soaked through my shirt.

Deodorant, I realized, would have been a good thing to remember.

No matter. Behind every U-Haul you see on the road, for every pair of bookcases you see roped into a pickup bed, there’s a Nittanyland spring ritual playing out.

Someone’s stuff is getting dissed. Someone’s hoping to stay on good terms with the curious new neighbor.

And someone — if he’s lucky — is tasting the best ‘free’ beer he’s had.

Since last spring, anyway.